In June, a leaked document revealed that the Egyptian government was looking for a sophisticated new tool to monitor its citizens social media and Internet activities.

Three months passed. Then, on Wednesday, anonymous government officials reportedly confirmed that a local company called Systems Engineering of Egypt (SEE or See Egypt) had won the bid to develop the system, which would allegedly allow the Egyptian government to sniff and analyze Internet and social media activity, as well as intercept Skype, WhatsApp and Viber conversations.

The system, according to an unnamed official quoted in the report, would be used not only as a tool to investigate crime and terrorism, but also as a way to watch people partaking in "debauchery" or "homosexual acts." To justify the need for such a surveillance system, the original document also highlighted "destructive ideas" such as "blasphemy," "sarcasm," or "inviting demonstrations."

But a day after BuzzFeed reported that SEE was the company chosen to develop Egypt's first Deep Packet Inspection system, identifying it as a "sister company" of American cybersecurity firm Blue Coat System, details of the system remain shrouded in mystery — and all the players involved are crying foul over the story.

The Egyptian government called the article "completely false" in a statement posted online by the Ministry of Interior.

On Thursday night, Abdel H. El-Sawy, SEE's president, claimed on his Facebook page that his company "has nothing to do" with providing surveillance technologies to Egypt's Ministry of Interior, or training its staff with them. El-Sawy denied any participation in the bid for Egypt's surveillance system.

The site came back online on Friday, displaying the same statement denying involvement that El-Sawy posted on Facebook.

Blue Coat, for its part, distanced itself from SEE, saying the company "has not responded, and does not intend to respond, to any tender for a social network monitoring operation in Egypt."

"See Egypt is a Blue Coat reseller, but is not otherwise affiliated with Blue Coat," the company said in a statement provided to Mashable. "See Egypt has assured us that they have not bid or resold Blue Coat products to the Egyptian government for any social network monitoring operation."

At this point, it's unclear whether BuzzFeed's story misrepresented government officials or whether Egypt's government and the companies involved in the surveillance system are in damage control mode.

"Why the hell would a company take down its website? It's not a coincidence," Ramy Raoof, an Egyptian technologist and human rights advocate, told Mashable.

Raoof said he doesn't have any reasons to doubt the veracity of the original BuzzFeed story, since SEE "is a company that's been a friend of the [Egyptian] government for a long time."

On its website, SEE lists various Egyptian government agencies as "customers," including the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology.

Unrealistic claims

Even prior to the denials, experts were skeptical of some details in the original report. Some of the claims regarding the systems' capabilities, made by both SEE and government officials, sounded unlikely to match the real technical capabilities of such a system."

"The program, the training we give, can also be used to penetrate WhatsApp, Viber, Skype, or other programs if needed," SEE's CEO Miniesy was quoted as saying in the original story.

An anonymous Ministry of Interior official also boasted of the system's powers. "We are looking at any conversation, any interaction, we might find worrying or would want to keep a closer eye on," he said, adding that the government monitors "dozens of Facebook groups."

But for Collin Anderson, an independent security researcher who studies the proliferation of censorship and surveillance technology around the world, these claims should not be taken at face value.

"Everyone overhypes," he told Mashable. While such a system would be "bad," "dangerous," and "fundamentally immoral," he warned that "we should also be mindful that there are a lot of bullshit claims out there."

Anderson explained that a Deep Packet Inspection (or DPI) system should not, by itself, be able to give its operator the ability to read encrypted data like WhatsApp messages or Skype conversations. A DPI system can help identify the data as pertaining to some of this services, but then the operator would need some other technology to unscramble the conversations, Anderson said.

It's not far-fetched that the Egyptian government could have acquired some technology to break the encryption on WhatsApp or Skype, said Eva Galperin, a technologist and global policy analyst for the advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The country's interest in surveillance technology, after all, is not new.

In 2011, protesters found documents that indicated that the Egyptian government had purchased spyware developed by a British company named Gamma International. Earlier this year, researchers also found traces of another kind of spyware in Egypt, this one developed by Italian company Hacking Team.

In terms of monitoring Facebook, since the site is protected by SSL web encryption, it's not trivial to spy on its users, according to both Galperin and Anderson.

"Here they're watching the stuff that it's public," Galperin said, explaining that it's more likely that they're monitoring public Facebook and Twitter activity. "This is being done the old fashioned way."

"You see these claims all the time," Anderson told Mashable. "Then when you sort of get down to what their practices are, what you see is usually old fashioned infiltration," such as arresting a member of a Facebook group and forcing him to give up his password, or infecting someone with malware to gain access to his computer.

Regardless, Raoof advised Egyptians to "use encryption" and "be aware of the consequences of their actions online."

Who's really behind the new surveillance system?

At this point, that answer remains unclear. Blue Coat denied involvement, but the company, which in 2013 was named by Reporters Without Borders as one of the "corporate enemies of the Internet" for selling products to repressive regimes around the world, has already given good reason not to trust it.

In 2011, a hacktivist group known as Telecomix uncovered evidence that Blue Coat devices were being used in Syria to spy on dissidents. Initially, Blue Coat claimed to have no knowledge of any of its equipment in Syria, but the company later admitted that, in fact, 13 of its censorship devices, destined to Iraq, had somehow ended up in Syria.

Blue Coat told Mashable that the company "supports internationally recognized rights to privacy and freedom of expression," and that it conducts "due diligence in our sales process to minimize the risk of our technology falling into the wrong hands or being misused in violation of our corporate policies."

But for Raoof, the Egyptian technologist, this is hard to believe.

"Most probably Blue Coat know their clients and who is using what of their products," he said in response to Blue Coat's statement. "The claim of being unaware of the clients who get products through resellers doesn't make sense.

In the "partners" section of SEE's website, other companies were listed that might provide systems like the one Egypt has been seeking since June, such as Fortinet, Cisco or HP, according to Anderson, the security researcher.

A Fortinet spokesperson said the company "can’t comment on rumors about how our products are potentially used by our channel partners."

"That said, Fortinet has multiple channel partners in Egypt, but as is common in a two-tier distribution model that most IT vendors use, we have no insight or oversight as to how those products are used," Fortinet's spokesperson Stefanie Hoffman told Mashable. "This is exclusively up to the partner and their customer/s."

Hoffman did not answer a follow-up email inquiring whether SEE is one of Fortinet's "channel partners" in the country.

A Cisco spokesperson confirmed that SEE is a "partner" and "a reseller" of Cisco's equipment in the country, but denied any knowledge of Egypt's new surveillance system.

"This topic is definitely new to us, and the development of mass surveillance solutions is not our business," Nigel Glennie, a Cisco spokesperson, told Mashable.

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